Tag: video

The Google Local Business Center

If you have not heard of the Google Local Business Center and most of your customers come from your local region, then you now have a high priority task today.  When prospects search for suppliers, Google will often now attempt to give them a list of local suppliers.  That’s particularly true if the searcher is using google.com and it is presumably only a short time before it applies to other Google searches like those done with Google.ca.

It works for all the common products and services where you might be looking for a local supplier.  You will usually find a block of ten local suppliers that is listed at the fourth position in the Google keyword search results for the particular product or service.  To an extent it may mean less business for Google as fewer people then click on the Sponsored Link (Adwords) advertisements at the top and down the right-hand side through which Google makes its money.

If you were previously relying on your natural occurrence in the Google search results (what is often called the organic search results), then your entry is pushed even farther down the page unless you can guarantee to be in the top three.  Perhaps that is the lever that will push many local businesses to buy sponsored link AdWords ads in order to appear on the initial screen (above the fold).

Google has now added a Local Business Center User Guide, and it includes a short video introduction to the service.

Mike Blumenthal is a keen watcher of the Google Local Search scene and he offers the following assessment of the  Local Business Center User Guide.

The Guide is a step in the right direction, is well organized and provides additional useful information. That being said, Google needs to “step it up” to bring the LBC into the realm of usable by the small business person it is intended to serve.

It is true that there is a degree of confusion here and for Google it clearly is a work in progress.  If you need any help in ensuring you are visible to your local customers then .

Can Google see your website?

Warning: this post is entirely conjectural and may have no basis in fact.

There is an interesting post by Loren Baker that encourages companies to develop video websites promoting their brands.  Their existence can be flagged by putting them on.TV domains.  He suggests that one should Take Advantage of .TV Domains for SEO and Reputation Management

There is a very large untapped market of creating .TV niche and business oriented online video sites which your business may be overlooking in your online marketing and search engine optimization strategy. If your business has a strong brand, then people are searching for your brand online. 

One way to attract that same user who is searching for your brand, and build the value of your brand in search results, is by launching a .TV site which is an online video representation of your company. By doing so, not only will you have another authority and valued site which should rank highly for your domain name, but you will also be engaging your customers in a form of social media.

He points out that this will ensure that companies are more visible in Google universal searches.  In any such search there will probably be a video within the first half dozen items.  If an image is associated with the brand, this image may also be referenced.  News items may also be included if the company is making news.

Having multiple online files associated with the company or brand clearly makes the company more visible in such searches.  An intriguing question is whether these multiple online properties have any synergistic effect in the regular Google keyword search algorithm.  Google has been very clear on the importance of hyperlinks in confirming the authority of web pages.  Most other facts about the algorithm are carefully kept confidential.

How important are images in the Google search algorithm?

A commonly held view is that images in a web page give zero information to the search robots.  It is emphasized that one should use Alt attributes to provide information on the subject of each image.  Nevertheless Google is trying to extract more information from images.  This can be seen in the Google image search that can now be done to find faces.

Given these developments, it is reasonable to infer that perhaps an image in a web page may be assessed for its contribution to the relevance of the page.  If there is an associated video file, perhaps this could also contribute to the relevance of a given web page.  If this view is correct, then any given web page may pick up contributions to its relevance from other associated video or image files.  This would encourage the creation of such associated picture files to improve the search visibility of a given web page.

It must be emphasized that this is all conjecture.  However nothing has been lost if the conjecture is untrue.  Creating associated images or video files may in any case contribute to the visibility and ranking in Google’s universal search listings.

MRN

 
MRN is Right on Time

MRN, now what might that be? Hopefully not just confusion with MSN. Off the bat we should mention that it is not Market Research News.

One must be very careful with acronyms as Marty Weintraub points out: Think SEO Before You Name Your New Company! He illustrates the difficulties with the acronym MRI.

The business is called “Masters Recording Institute.” Cool name right? Let’s take a more careful look. From an SEO services perspective, it’s a classic search engine optimization blunder. To start: everybody loves initials. From our experience, a good percentage of future direct brand searches could occur on the initials “MRI.”

It’s possible that the curious are already referring to the company as such. Sadly, searches for “MRI” result in harvesting all sorts of information about “magnetic resonance imaging,” which is useless in this context. Needless to say, ranking on the average search engine results page (SERP) for the keyword MRI might take a team of link-building-specialists months – and perhaps cost quite a bit.

He is so right. Thankfully for MRN, the competition in a Google search seems less ferocious. Here are some of the top runners.

  • Ministère des Ressources naturelles et de la Faune, Quebec
    http://www.mrn.gouv.qc.ca/
  • MRN Radio Networks
    http://www.racingone.com/mrn_home.aspx
  • Manufacturers Resource Network, owners of the MRN.com domain
    http://www.mrn.com/

The other meaning of the acronym MRN is Marketing Right Now. Surprisingly there are few heavyweight contenders for this acronym. One that caught my eye was MRN – Morgue Reference Number. It does not seem all that popular despite the morbid interest that so many people seem to have in programs like CSI and Bones.

This all gives comfort that the acronym MRN can be used as a shorthand for Marketing Right Now. Hopefully Google will confirm the rightness of this choice in a little while.